Google Interview Experience - Fullstack L4 India

Getting the opportunity to Interview at Google

I got this opportunity to get interviewed at Google from LinkedIn, where one of the recruiters reached out to me and a couple of my friends regarding a job opportunity at Google. I quickly replied with yes and forwarded my resume to initiate the process.

Starting Preparation for Interviews

I received a phone call from a recruiter where she asked me my basic details, my work experience, and whether I'm comfortable in DSA. I provided her with my information and demonstrated that I had some experience with DSA. She then proceeded to ask me about when I wanted my interviews to be scheduled, and since I hadn't had my hands on DSA after college, I asked for a time of 2 months for preparation, and she agreed with it and provided me with the form via email in which I had to put the dates I'd be available for the interview. I thought that each day one interview would take place, so I allotted different days for different interviews. I've been informed that I'll be interviewing for the L4 Fullstack Engineer role, and I'll be having 5 Rounds in total. 3 Coding rounds, 1 Design round, and 1 behavioural round I chose interview dates in August and had two months to prepare.

1st Coding Round

This was the best coding round I had because the Interviewer was very polite and guided me throughout the interview on how to approach an interview in a subtle way. This was a basic DP problem, which I answered with a binary search solution, but even though I never reached the best optimal solution, she was happy with what I came up with. HR then told me after the interview about the interview feedback, and it was a Strong Hire.

Verdict: Strong Hire

2nd Coding Round

This time the interview was taken by a lady from a different country. The problem was related to calculating similarity coefficients and was followed up with an optimisation that required binary search. It was again a good experience, as she was surprised that I was able to code the solution in the last 5–10 minutes with an explanation. Even though she gave me a hire, she probably forgot to fill out my feedback form, because of which I was later asked to give an additional coding round.

Verdict: Hire

3rd System Design Round

This interview was supposed to be a design interview but turned out to be a coding round. I was trying to convince the interviewer that this was supposed to be a design round, but he told me that he was informed it would be a coding round. We waited for a few minutes, around 10–15 minutes, to get details from HR. I was trying to convince him because I was sitting there with the mentality of solving a design problem, and I didn't want to do DSA in case I messed up. He proceeded with asking me about the DSA problem on Tree, which was more of a practical use case similar to merging two configuration files. He followed up by asking for different scenarios, and since JS was my language of implementation, I had a good experience dealing with JSON. He was, in the end, happy with my implementation and gave me Hire.

Verdict: Hire

4th Coding Round

This interview somehow went wrong as the interviewer never opened the camera and gave me a question on Sliding windows. Which I knew how to solve, but I was trying to share my approach with him, but since he was not giving any feedback, I was continuously trying to explain my approach on how my two-pointer code and idea were working. Which resulted in a loss of time, and he had a follow-up question that we weren't able to solve.

Verdict: Leaning No Hire

5th Behavioural Round

This was a generic behavioural round where he gave me a few scenarios and asked me what I would do in these scenarios. I tried to answer all of his questions using the STAR method.

Verdict: Hire

Freeze

After my interview was completed in August, my application was put on hold because of the hiring freeze. I kept on pinging HR following updates on my profile, to which she told me they were putting my profile on priority.

Team Fit

Almost a year later, HR again reached out to me and asked me to arrange a team fit call, which I agreed to and had a conversation with the team manager. She shared with me details about her team, and we had a conversation about it.

6th Coding Round

HR contacted me and said that the manager is happy with my profile and will agree to move forward with it, but just because one of my interviews didn't have proper feedback, I was asked to give a coding round again. I agreed to it and gave it my fourth coding round. The interviewer was very polite and helped me by giving examples of where my approach could go wrong. I quickly coded the solution, and he then asked me for an optimisation, which I solved with presum and binary search (It was a medium-level problem). We didn't have time to code the optimisation; we just discussed the solution and talked about the time complexity of the algorithm. At the end of the interview, he was happy with my approach and gave me a Hire.

Verdict: Hire
I'll share compensation details as soon as I get them.